A horror fan’s horror film with The Human Centipede

Akihiro Kitamura co-stars as Katsuro, a hostage who may find himself more closely linked than he would like to with traveling students Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) in The Human Centipede (First Sequence), an award winning horror film from Dutch writer and director Tom Six.Described as a grotesque one-of-a-kind experience that is guaranteed to shock and divide audiences, Tom Six’s twisted biological horror film The Human Centipede confidently goes where few films have dared to go. In addition to its shocking imagery, the film also features an indelibly villainous performance by Dieter Laser, whose brilliant and demented Dr. Heiter has reached cult icon status amongst horror film fans.

The story begins two American girls find themselves alone at night when their car breaks down in the German woods during a European road trip. Searching for help, they find an isolated villa whose mysterious owner, Dr. Heiter, takes them in for the night.

The next day they awake to find themselves in the basement, trapped in a terrifying makeshift hospital with another one of the doctor’s abductees. Dr. Heiter explains to the three of them that he is retired surgeon who had specialized in separating Siamese twins.

His three “patients”, however, are not about to be separated, but will be joined together in a horrific operation. He plans to be the first to connect people, one to the next, via their gastric system, and in doing so bring to life his sick lifetime fantasy: ‘the human centipede’.

Director Tom Six states that the twisted story bends on what could have been with Nazi scientists free to do with people as they would, and seemed like an accurate scenario that might have played out with a real life surgeon.

“One of my own nightmares would be being experimented on by Nazi doctors,” stated Six. “So the idea came quickly to have a German doctor perform the operation.

Kitamura was born in 1979 in Kochi, Japan, and studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse for five years before studying filmmaking at North Carolina School of the Arts and Los Angeles City College. He has written, directed, and starred in two feature films, “Porno”, and “I’ll Be There With You” which starred Daniel Baldwin.

Kitamura is a winner of the LA Indies 2006 “Outstanding Indie Directorial Debut Award” for “I’ll Be There With You”. In 2008, he acted in popular TV shows such as VH1’s “New York Goes to Hollywood” and MTV’s “From Gs to Gents”. He recently appeared in NBC’s “Heroes” as Tadashi, the Japanese Businessman who tries to commit suicide because he was fired from his job for inappropriate behavior after he photocopied his butt during a New Year’s Eve party.